The artist Walter De Maria, best-known for his large-scale installations, minimalist sculptures, and earthworks pieces like “The Lightning Field” (1977) in New Mexico, died on Thursday at age 77, his studio told the Los Angeles Times.

Born in the Bay Area, De Maria earned an MA in art from UC Berkeley in 1959 before relocating to New York the following year. Even before gaining acclaim for his takes on the dominant Minimalist aesthetic of the 1960s, de Maria was firmly embedded in New York’s downtown scene. He and the artist Robert Whitman opened a gallery on Great Jones Street in 1963. The same year he was the drummer for the band The Primitives, which, after several evolutions, would become Lou Reed’s The Velvet Underground. After experimenting with box-like wooden sculptures in the early '60s, he began to make his first works in metal in 1965, and was included in the Jewish Museum’s landmark exhibition “Primary Structures” in 1966.

By the end of the decade he seemed to have moved beyond sculpture and became known as a pioneer of the Land art and earthworks movements. In 1968 he created “Mile Long Drawing,” a pair of parallel lines inscribed on the ground in the Mohave Desert, which he first conceived in 1962. He continued to create such large-scale outdoor installations throughout the following decade, culminating in 1972’s “Three Continent Project,” “The Lightning Field,” and the “Vertical Earth Kilometer,” which he created for Documenta in 1977.

“I think he’s one of the greatest artists of our time,” former Dia Art Foundation director and current LACMA chief Michael Govan told the L.A. Times. De Maria’s large installation “The 2000 Sculpture” (1992) — which consists of 2,000 white metal rods arrayed in a geometric pattern on the floor — was installed at LACMA last fall for six months.

During the last half-century he exhibited extensively overseas, especially in Europe: He had a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome in 2003 and large-scale solo shows at the Centre Pompidou, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, and the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, among others. In the U.S., he remained best known for his permanent public installations. His first major solo show at an American museum, the Menil Collection’s “Walter De Maria: Trilogies,” opened in 2011.

In addition to the legendary “The Lightning Field” — whose restoration his dealer, Larry Gagosian, helped to restore last year — his pieces “The New York Earth Room” and “The Broken Kilometer,” which are also managed by the Dia Art Foundation, remain on view in Soho. His work “Apollo’s Ecstasy” (1990), an installation of about two dozen bronze poles laid on the ground in a slanted pattern, is one of the largest pieces in Massimiliano Gioni’s exhibition “The Encyclopedic Palace” at this year’s Venice Biennale.